So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career.

I used to be quite obsessed with films and filmmaking. I spent a great chunk of my young adulthood watching films and analysing them. I had semesters in university dedicated to it. I even used to organise a film festival! I was really obsessed with films! From watching the latest and obscure films, going to film festivals abroad and participating in shorts competitions. And the worst: even dated a filmmaker! It was a thing I used to love and even envisioned making my own. And at one point, like an ick, my interest in it disappeared instantly.

And I’m reflecting now because I was washing my dishes after having scrolled for a little bit on BlueSky. Stupid AI has mentally ruined me and my peers. It’s like everything has lost meaning. And I was thinking about how I technically also feel that burnout, that tiredness, that sadness, and that has been going on for years now. But to me, it started with the React world. It started when everything was done with a JavaScript framework, ignoring the web platform, the craft of back-end developers and dismissing the skills of front-end developers. And that’s when my burnout and my existential crisis in the web development community started.

Despite admitting online that I had a whole big girl cry over AI and the future of my career (and bills), I was reflecting on why this sadness doesn’t feel very strange to me. And I’ve realised it’s because I’ve been through this before with my previous passion: films. And I was trying to pinpoint the moment. When did this happen?

I have a very vivid memory of how there were photographers and cinematographers that started to get quite upset when DSLR cameras became more affordable to the public. I have this memory of people complaining and saying, “Oh, now everybody can call themselves a photographer. They buy a very expensive camera and they call themselves a photographer!”. And I remember seeing those posts online and feeling sad and rejected, because technically, due to my age, it was literally impossible for me to have started earlier in that industry. So yeah, I landed in a time where certain devices were more affordable to the public to buy. And people who had been there in that industry for so many years were not happy about how things became easier for newcomers. We see this in web development as well. I mean, web development has both sides of the coin: it’s either extremely open in teaching, welcoming and educating and breaking barriers for people to get into the industry, but it also can be extremely gatekeeping, mostly for self-preservation. While this was a bitter memory I quickly brushed it off as this wasn’t it. This wasn’t what made me leave. In fact, me and my colleagues at the time were thinking: “okay, some people are moaning about us not being real photographers because we are having it easier now. Okay. Our work will speak for itself.”.

Then it came to me. The exact moment I disconnected and it was like a black-and-white situation where my feelings vanished completely.

I went to a horror film festival that I used to love. I used to love horror films. I used to enjoy ghosts, aliens, zombies and monsters and anything that was unnatural or unrealistic. And then the selection of films I watched that year all involved sexual assault. That was the horror. I remember during one particular film that had an explicit brutal scene, I started to look around me in the theatre, and nobody was flinching. Nobody was uncomfortable or twisting their body or looking at their watch or their phone or wanting to leave their seat. Everybody was actually watching it as if that was entertainment. And I was disgusted. I was repulsed. I was uncomfortable. I felt I had lost respect for everybody around me. I was confused about why a daily thing that happens, a crime, a horror, was entertainment. And that was the moment. That was the moment I just never set foot in anything related to films again. And I know it’s not a representation of all films, all categories, all themes, all festivals. But I felt disconnected… mostly from the audience. Hundreds of people.

This is my peers' moment with web development with AI. They (and so am I) are disgusted by the lack of ethics, environmental consequences, the horrible uses of AI on the daily, horrible companies, horrible people. And we are looking around and everyone else is eating it up and enjoying it. This is the tipping point. And I get that.

For personal reasons, or whatever life reasons, I’m quite familiar with disappointment and lack of values being matched and having to move on. I can see that we will see people forced out of the industry or just move on to something else for their own sake. We will lose good people in exchange for cheap, quick and shit outputs. Quick horror film? Woman alone to be assaulted! Quick website? AI it.

I’ve cried a lot over AI. I’ve also cried a lot between 2015 and 2017. I couldn’t find a single job spec that cared about CSS. I thought I was useless and didn’t know where to turn or I should just give up.

I’ve recently been turning more and more to DIY, sewing and crafts to lift my spirits up. But doing so in a capitalist society is still daunting. The slop is everywhere. Even to wind-down I have to navigate the other craft’s shit show: the fast-fashion, polyester, fabric waste, drop-shipping, stolen designs, pollution, etc.

But even in those communities there's always the crafters: the people who care and will have you and teach you and support you.

That’s how I’ve been surviving since 2015. By trying to mingle and be where the crafters are. If given the choice wouldn’t you rather watch an Oscar nominated film instead of a fast-produced straight to streaming film? Wouldn’t you take a carefully ethically crafted wool jumper instead of a She-in polyester one?

And there isn’t really a conclusion to post. Just getting it out of the system and hope I can still pay bills until I die.

Highlights

• It turns out that most of Refactoring English’s readers come from outside the US.
• I’m using AI-assisted coding too much.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

For one of my cosmology course assignments I had to pick either the ontological or a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, discuss what I think is its weakest point, and attempt to strengthen it. I then presented a version of my answer as part of a seminar, together with a partner who answered a different but ultmimately related question related to cosmology and religion.

I was on the We l❤️ Open Source podcast and talked about the threats to open source and software. Trading openness for convenience: From app stores to AI assistants

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages.

Here they are:

• the dig man page (now with examples)
• the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples)

the goal: include the most basic examples

The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for people who use tcpdump or dig infrequently (or have never used it before!) and don’t remember how it works.

So far saying “hey, I want to write an examples section for beginners and infrequent users of this tools” has been working really well. It’s easy to explain, I think it makes sense from everything I’ve heard from users about what they want from a man page, and maintainers seem to find it compelling.

Thanks to Denis Ovsienko, Guy Harris, Ondřej Surý, and everyone else who reviewed the docs changes, it was a good experience and left me motivated to do a little more work on man pages.

why improve the man pages?

I’m interested in working on tools’ official documentation right now because:

• Man pages can actually have close to 100% accurate information! Going through a review process to make sure that the information is actually true has a lot of value.
• Even with basic questions “what are the most commonly used tcpdump flags”, often maintainers are aware of useful features that I’m not! For example I learned by working on these tcpdump examples that if you’re saving packets to a file with tcpdump -w out.pcap, it’s useful to pass -v to print a live summary of how many packets have been captured so far. That’s really useful, I didn’t know it, and I don’t think I ever would have noticed it on my own.

It’s kind of a weird place for me to be because honestly I always kind of assume documentation is going to be hard to read, and I usually just skip it and read a blog post or Stack Overflow comment or ask a friend instead. But right now I’m feeling optimistic, like maybe the documentation doesn’t have to be bad? Maybe it could be just as good as reading a really great blog post, but with the benefit of also being actually correct? I’ve been using the Django documentation recently, and it’s really good! We’ll see.

on avoiding writing the man page language

The tcpdump project tool’s man page is written in the roff language, which is kind of hard to use and that I really did not feel like learning it.

I handled this by writing a very basic markdown-to-roff script to convert Markdown to roff, using similar conventions to what the man page was already using. I could maybe have just used pandoc, but the output pandoc produced seemed pretty different, so I thought it might be better to write my own script instead. Who knows.

I did think it was cool to be able to just use an existing Markdown library’s ability to parse the Markdown AST and then implement my own code-emitting methods to format things in a way that seemed to make sense in this context.

man pages are complicated

I went on a whole rabbit hole learning about the history of roff, how it’s evolved since the 70s, and who’s working on it today, inspired by learning about the mandoc project that BSD systems (and some Linux systems, and I think Mac OS) use for formatting man pages. I won’t say more about that today though, maybe another time.

In general it seems like there’s a technical and cultural divide in how documentation works on BSD and on Linux that I still haven’t really understood, but I have been feeling curious about what’s going on in the BSD world.

The comments section is here.